Preserving Our Past For The Future

journey

Tomorrow marks a very important day. It is the long-awaited retail shop opening for my estate company. It is almost surreal that it is finally here after all the months, moving, money and monumental hurdles we have passed. But…it is here. The first day of what I hope to be my greatest adventure yet.

The journey has been full of many firsts. From placing first deposits on utilities, to making first assessments of what we wanted to see happen, to moving in the first truckloads of items. We experienced our first “oh great” when the bathroom ceiling caved in under the overflow of a strained water heater. We experienced our first sale to someone who came by to just take a quick peek at the store as we were moving in. There was the first full staff work day of shelving and sorting and laughing over several voices being heard from the depths of the piles every so often saying “oooh I want to buy this!” We went through our first challenge of rezoning so we could even have a storefront in the area we had chosen to make our estate home. We were never so excited as when the unanimous vote came through from the Planning Commission and the Mayor and Aldermen…and we knew we were really on our way.

This week was full of firsts in other ways too. My 6 year old granddaughter lost her first tooth and it was on the very day she started first grade. It is so funny to see her gappy little smile and hear the softest lisp when she talks or sings the songs she is learning in theater class. Her mom was a bit teary when she told me “This is the first time I will have my first child lose a tooth…ever.” I hadn’t really thought about that till she voiced it, but that is true. This is the only time the first of my grandchildren will lose the very first grandchild tooth. Ok, enough of that…misty here for a moment myself.

I thought a bit today about how that little ole tooth got loose enough to be the first tooth lost….what it had to go through, how it all came about. Lorelai has been growing teeth since the womb, even though we didn’t all see them. Enamel was forming, along with nerves and all the gooey little stuff that teeth are made of was there all along just waiting to “become”. She had to drink only milk for a very long time, then the teeth started to cut the surface and push out into the world of her mouth. Soft food was added bit by bit, then table food cut into microscopic pieces so she could chew with her tiny little tooth buds. Once the baby teeth were fully developed she could tackle anything and everything she wanted to eat.

Then…one day the tooth started feeling funny and not quite right. It kind of ached and hurt a bit. When she would chew it would zing her and zap her gums. She began to chew on one side trying to avoid using the tooth so it would feel like it used to and not hurt anymore. But eventually this wasn’t working because the tooth was loosening its grip in her gum. Her mom told her about the Tooth Fairy, how it all worked and in exchange for a tooth she would get MONEY. It made her change her whole outlook. That tooth suddenly had to go!

The next several weeks were spent wiggling it, touching her tongue to it every chance she got, pushing it and prodding it till one night this past week it finally gave way and popped right out. But it wasn’t because she was pushing and prodding and wiggling it. It was because, unknown to Lorelai, a new better tooth had formed and was making its way into her gum. It pushed its way to the surface and encouraged that baby tooth to leave.

And that is where I have been in this journey to today. Looking from the outside in, it appears I am doing something “suddenly” to most folks who know me. I hadn’t ever conducted an estate sale, but three years ago I found myself doing just that. I have never opened a storefront, but tomorrow…well, I am doing that. I haven’t decorated or staged a shop to sell vintage and antique items, and now I am. It would easily look like this business just popped up. But it didn’t.

I spent many years loving the old junk. I loved having it in my home, learning about it, buying pieces at yard sales because I couldn’t afford new stuff. People complimented me on clothing my family wore, or furniture and decor in my home, and I smiled knowing where it came from. I also learned a lot about the things I had in my home and educated myself on what a good buy was, and that is aiding me today. I spent much time three years working at my church as the back drop prop person for the church cantatas and children’s programs. I also spent two summers doing nothing but making bulletin boards for my church and the preschool where I was a teacher’s aide. So I became very adept at making something out of nothing and frugal backgrounds and staging are second nature to me.

As an employee of a local Christian Bookstore, I learned merchandising and how to set up booths and displays. When my family had a craft business many moons ago, I did the same there and spent much time putting up and tearing down displays quickly and effectively and making sure our booth stood out among the others, but was never the same any two shows. I also did professional organizing for several years and helped others get their purged items ready for sale, priced and even aided in the sales from time to time.

The most recent venture was a cleaning company where I did my own books, had a full staff, dealt with employee and customer issues daily, balanced spending against profit, did a business plan, and virtually anything that was done in that company went through me first. And all these things…from bulletin boards to business plans…were “firsts” for me then, but represented a wiggly tooth now.

All those places in my life, all those activities and moments had their day, then they were gone. It took them leaving and my life that I have now pushing through to the surface for me to know that they were all just bits of the puzzle, not the completed puzzle itself.

I could be wrong, this may not be the final thing I do. I may have yet another “tooth” under the surface and this business is only a means to an end. Time will tell. But I do know that life is not so much about the destination as it is about the journey. I also know sometimes you have to let things get pretty wiggly and scary for a while, move around a bit, and maybe even eventually fall completely away before the new growth can take up its rightful place.

But until I know differently, I will move forward…first one step, then another…till I reach that destination and I will not question the process. And with my personality, trust me…that will truly be a first.

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This blog post comes at the end of a perfect day. I usually go to yard sales a.k.a. junkin’ as my Granddaughter calls it, but not today. I decided to stay home and work around my house instead. So much was accomplished…the piles of things that had accumulated over the last week from estate clean outs and purchasing trips was put away, housework was done, organizing in my home office was marked off the list and I was ready to retire for the night. Then I remembered that I had read there was a meteor shower, more visible after midnight, and I quickly looked at my watch and decided to head outdoors. The air was really cool for this time of year, unseasonably so. I had a glass of strawberry zinfandel and my lawn chair as silent companions, and I waited, peering up at the night sky. Perseid comes through each August. It is the time of year that the Earth goes through the shattered remains of a comet that actually began disintegrating around the time of the Civil War. Amazing, we are still feeling the effects every year at the same time, just like clockwork.

As I sat waiting for the light show I was certain would be spectacular, I began to grow restless when no shooting “stars” were visible immediately. After maybe 6 or 7 minutes I saw something fly across my peripheral vision…and then it was gone…so fast I thought “Did I really see what I thought I saw?” So I waited for another…and waited. More time passed and I was about to convince myself I had seen a random firefly rather than a meteor when right in front of me swoosh…one flew past…and went out as suddenly as it had appeared. Now that was thrilling! I couldn’t wait to see the next, and the next…the time in between was pretty much the same…every 6 minutes or so, but once I had seen a sure meteor, I KNEW I would see another one, so the wait felt shorter each time one flew past my line of vision. I never doubted again that I would see exactly what I had come out to see…a life event.

As I gathered my things and came indoors I realized I had witnessed a life lesson for myself. So many times we ask, we pray, we plead for opportunities to change our life, our job, our home. We wait on those opportunities…and we wait. We think there will be a “sign in the sky” or some type of out of the ordinary event that will give us the assurance that THIS is what we need to do, or THAT is where we need to go with our path. Many times the chance to make a real life change comes by so quickly, we aren’t even sure we really saw, or heard, what we thought we did. So we continue to wait for change to happen on its own. Time passes and we think we really didn’t see the opportunity clearly and maybe we were wrong to even think that…oh, there goes another opportunity whizzing by…much brighter than the first! This is when we may get excited…maybe, just maybe, I am on the right path this time…maybe this is where I am supposed to be, doing what I am supposed to do. And maybe…when we were so heartsick, lonely ,afraid or feeling as if we were in a huge rut we didn’t see the opportunities coming, just like clockwork, every year, every month, or day to give us the permission to accept them and pursue our own contentment.

In the same way the comet exploded into tiny fragments, with millions of pieces flying through the air and our planet barreling through those fragments for the last 150 plus years…maybe we are guilty of spinning through opportunity after opportunity, rather than seeing them right in front of us because we were looking for that one big “something” rather than the tiny little pieces that would make the spectacular life we have always wanted become a reality.

In the Bible, 2nd Corinthians says our troubles are “light and momentary” but achieving a far greater thing in eternal ways. Perhaps all the light and momentary opportunities, just like the meteors that went flying past and were gone, are just the pre-show to the really wonderful life that is to come…if only we reach out and take hold of them before they are gone. I only know, I don’t want to be sitting in a lawn chair watching my opportunities…and my real life path…go flying past anymore. It’s time to gather the light and momentary and turn it into something lasting and true .